An improved mechanism for understanding the quantum field theory of fundamental particle masses is presented. Yoichiro Nambu, founder of QCD color charge, in 1952 argued in his paper "An Empirical Mass Spectrum of Elementary Particles" (Progress in Theoretical Physics, v7, 1952, pp. 595-6): "It seems to be a general conviction of current physicists that the theory of elementary particles in its ultimate form could or should give the mass spectrum of these particles just in the same way as quantum mechanics has succeeded in accounting for the regularity of atomic spectra. ... it may perhaps be too ambitious and rather unsound to look for an empirical ‘Balmer’s law’. Nevertheless we should like here to present one such attempt because it happens to be extremely simple ..."

Virtual fermions are radially polarized (driven further apart) by the electric field in which they formed. This polarization supplies the virtual fermions energy, at the expense of electric field, which is thus partly “screened.” The energy supplied to virtual fermions by their radial polarization extends their lifetime beyond Heisenberg’s h/E.  This supply of extra energy moves “virtual” fermions towards the real mass shell, so they briefly obey Pauli’s principle. The absorbed extra energy increases the virtual fermion pair survival time towards that of onshell particles, so the Pauli exclusion principle begins to apply to those virtual fermions, structuring the vacuum virtual fermions into “shells” by analogy to electron orbits, giving a simple pattern of discrete masses. Different isomers are possible explaining the generations and allowing a variety of weak decay routes, a mechanism for the CKM matrix and neutrino flavor oscillations. Because neutrinos only have weak charges (not electromagnetic charge or color charge), they have weak fields, producing on average little mass due to very occasional pair production, so they weakly interact with gravity (gravity’s charge is mass), thus explaining why neutrinos have so little mass.